Old, white and angry...the Faux news demographic

[Augiedog]

What does it say about a person that, as they grow older, they get meaner, angrier and hateful almost to a fault? If, in living your life, you find yourself hating entire groups of "others" with real passion, perhaps the problem is with you and not the "others". Experience and just living life should teach that the world is mostly filled with good people, not a bunch of grotesque entities that need hating from you. I think perhaps the real key is knowledge, and this seems to be an issue that Faux news addresses by trying to keep its viewers ignorant. I may remember this inaccurately but I think it was Thomas Paine who said in "The Rights of Man" that you can't make people ignorant, but you can keep them ignorant. Is it possible this is the hidden motto of Faux news? If, as you grow older and supposedly wiser and you find yourself getting angrier and angrier, you are definitely doing it wrong, living life to its possible best that is.

[pangaia]

1. I think part of the cause of that behavior..

- growing older, getting meaner, angrier and hateful - comes from a life not spent in self-reflection and self-study. These are people who never really questioned anything in themselves and so never matured emotionally, intellectually or psychologically. So, with advancing age, they realize they have.. nothing. They are nothing. But because they either do not even see that now, or some tiny eye perhaps does see that, but they deny it, they fear their approaching death and need to find someone and/or something else to blame for their own failures and the waste of their life.

[Augiedog]

2. Personal sense of self worth

I guess my problem is with accepting as normal the adage that when you are young you are liberal and as you grow older you become a conservative. I n this day and age that seems to suggest that intolerance, hate and anger are natural transitions, almost as if they are issued along with social security checks. If in living, you cannot see that others share the same hopes and dreams, needs and wants as you, or if you think because they are different from you they are less deserving of these things...you bring the same judgement upon yourself from those who see you as deserving of scorn or worse. I can only imagine how awful life must be in a conservative household, wracked with anger at a world that won't behave as they would have it, and populated by "takers" who should just go away and maybe even drop dead, but please, not in my yard. Personally I find myself, at 64, more and more in dismay at the apparent willingness of supposed "decent" people to bring suffering upon those less fortunate. A policy of allowing hungry children to become starving children is simply unconscionable.

[Rozlee]

3. Neo Confederates and evangelicals are an explosive mix.

Their philosophies teach them an Us vs. Them mentality. They long for a past that they thought was glorious and are still resentful of the outcome of the Civil War, even 150 years later. They have a sense of victimization and feel persecuted and that the rest of the world is against them. They live with a feeling of injustice and paranoia. The world is black and white; they make excuses for their own short-comings and exaggerate those of everyone else, attributing the worst to them. They judge those they oppose by Old Testament standards, but ignore the beams in their own eyes. All conservatives and right-wingers share many of these feelings of constant victimization, but among neo-Confederates, it goes far deeper. Reconstruction got fucked up royally and the breach has never healed. A Marshall Plan might have blunted such hostilities, but to this day, the once-proud South remains poverty-stricken and reliant on federal assistance. Religious demagogues and politicians have always known which buttons to push to make their simmering anger boil over. Here at home, I always hear discussions about how close "we" were to winning the Civil War and would have done so if only we'd managed to take Antietam or some other battle. Fantasies.

[johnlucas]

5. BINGO!

Them suckers are STILL fighting the Civil War!
Even after Civil Rights laws were passed.

1860s to 1960s. Those guys are bitter & spiteful.
And they will do anything to damage & sabotage the Union.
They are STILL in Rebellion.

John Lucas

[thecrow]

4. Part of it is due to changes in the brain

As we get older, the brain shrinks, and as we get older and more isolated, the world shrinks too.
My mother was reliably one of the kindest people you'd ever want to meet, but as she got into her 80's and closer to death she sometimes became very blunt to the point of being abusive. It was due to the changes in her brain.

[dem in texas]

6. Not all oldsters are mean and conservative

I am 74 years old, will soon be 75. I am just a liberal now as I was when I was in my 20's. I am much more forgiving of human failure and try to understand why people do the mean things they do. That said, all my family and in-laws of the same age group as me are right wing conservatives and watch Fox News and call me a "bleeding heart".

[totodeinhere]

7. True. There is a large community of progressive seniors posting right here at DU.

n/t